70% of Fed IT Execs Peg Big Data as Mission Critical – MeriTalk/EMC

MeriTalk, an online community and go-to resource for government IT, announced the results of its new report, Smarter Uncle Sam: The Big Data Forecast.

Based on a survey of 150 Federal IT executives and underwritten by EMC Corporation, the study found that big data has the potential to transform government by substantially increasing efficiency, enabling smarter decisions, deepening insight, and, according to U.S. Feds (Surveyed U.S. federal IT decision makers, titles include CIO, CTO, IT director/supervisor, IT manager, data center manager, and other IT manager), saving nearly $500 billion – or 14% of agency budgets – across the federal government. Of those surveyed 69% of U.S. Feds say big data will help create smarter government.

Big Data Building Blocks
Agencies are taking steps to prepare for what big data has to offer in a largely uncharted territory. As proof, nearly one-fourth of federal IT executives (federal IT decision makers include CIO, CTO, IT director/supervisor, IT manager, data center manager, and other IT manager) have launched at least one big data initiative, such as investing in IT systems and solutions to improve data capture, processing and storage, and identifying challenges that big data can solve.

Building the foundation for these initiatives,
feds are spending big data R&D dollars to:

• Increase server storage capacity to house and analyze big data
• Determine bandwidth needs for big data storage and analytics
• Invest in advances data mining practices

Big Data Budget
31% of respondents believe their agency has a sufficient big data strategy today – with sequestration budget cuts posing a significant risk to launching new big data programs. When asked about budget as it relates to big data, 41% are experiencing budget cuts of more than 10% as a result of sequestration.

When asked to identify the sequestration casualties
federal IT executives identified the following:

• 51% – training and workforce development
• 48% – hardware upgrades
• 41% – software upgrades
• 40% – new application development

Future of Big Data
Looking ahead, federal IT executives say agencies should significantly increase data management efforts, ideally tagging 46% of agency data and analyzing 45%. Recognizing big data’s impact on these goals, 70% of IT executives believe that in five years successfully leveraging big data will be critical to fulfilling federal mission objectives.

When asked how big data
will help fulfill federal missions:

• 51% said big data will help improve processes and efficiency
• 44% said big data will enhance security
• 31% said big data will help their agency predict trends

"Big data is transforming government," says Rich Campbell, chief technologist, federal, EMC. "Each agency needs to first identify how big data can support their mission objectives, then assess the infrastructure, the savings opportunity, and start with a pilot project. There is enormous opportunity ahead for government to apply Big and Fast Data to manage data growth, gain new insights from data, and innovate in ways that weren’t possible before due to technology limitations. It will enable agencies to be more productive, work smarter and be more agile – to keep up with the pace of change."

"Big data’s different from other IT initiatives – because it’s not an IT initiative," said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. "If assuming the same behavior and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity, big data may provide the common-sense therapy we need to make better decisions in government."

The report has a margin of error of 7.97% at a 95% confidence level.

To download full report (registration needed)